Competitions → Y Gors
Streetlife and Landezine International Competition: Lost Sites
Team: Aphra Das Gupta, Henry Westphal-Reed, Lenka Rajmont
Brief in short:
Lost sites are all around us. Fortunately, there are designers like you that know how to improve them. In times of social and environmental distress, the world is increasingly more aware of the significance of open space and the issues of urbanisation. Qualities of urban sites are lost due to various social changes, rising parking needs, inappropriate design and neglect.
The competition is looking for multidisciplinary solutions to spatial issues concerning urbanisation. From urban centres to residential housing on the margins, the competition seeks ideas to improve the quality of urban outdoors and challenges modes of urbanisation.
Our Response:
Y Gors takes place in Monmouth, Wales. We are working with a lost site in the center of the city, this site used to be a grazing ground, a site for sports, circus, temporary traveller housing and more. In the last decade, the site has been sitting unused, fenced off and overgrown despite the need for more housing in the area. This site is a flood plane, and drops drastically from the elevation of the main town, entirely disconnecting unhoused communities from the rest of the town.
We are vertically connecting this lost site with the sub-terranian belly of the city, providing more housing opportunities for the unhoused community curretly residing in this urban underbelly. Subsequently by elevating the site, we are supporting the ecology of the site as a flood plane.